The deer that peppered both sides of the runway raised their heads as we approached from above. Was it possible these gentle beasts were descended from those who lifted their eyes in the December air of 1903 when two brothers from Ohio made avionic history on these wind-swept dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks?

We were about to touch down in our Cessna near the place where yellow-block letters spanning the length of our small plane's wings commemorated the state's airfield as "First in Flight."

Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, would be our last destination before heading northward to New England, and it's no secret that traveling by small plane has posed a challenge for this reluctant and frequent flier.

"It's not the fear of heights ... it's the fear of gravity," a friend suggested.

And he has a point when he says it's part of the human condition to want to rise to higher places and achieve success, and that it's the fear of falling -- falling from grace and, ultimately, failing -- that really rattles us. I suppose I am coming to act more like a bird to ease my fears and possibly think a little more like the Wright brothers, who were willing to put themselves in harm's way to pave a road to aviation.

In 1900, Wilbur Wright wrote to Octave Chanute, wealthy businessman and successful engineer, that he had long "been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.

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" Those letters from Wilbur Wright to Chanute, archived at The Library of Congress, reveal Wilbur's tenacity and much more. His effective pitch to Chanute declares, "My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life."

Being able to travel by plane at all is owed to a couple of visionary brothers who ran a bicycle shop in Ohio more than 115 years ago. It occurred to me, as I climbed out onto the wing and took the two tiny boarding steps down to the tarmac, that I hadn't spent the entire flight obsessing over what could go wrong while we were "up there."

Steve reached into the plane's baggage compartment, eyeing my bulging suitcase, and asked over his shoulder, "Do you need all of this?" Yes. I needed all that one stuffed bag represented. It was a reminder that I had not given up and hopped the first bus home.

I slipped off my flip-flops and into a pair of boots, pulled out a scarf and zipped up my leather jacket against the never-ending Outer Banks wind. Past the oaks skirting the hill behind Steve, who was already changing out of his summer shorts and into a pair of jeans, rose a 100-foot sand dune where a granite monolith reflected the copper hues of a coming sunset. Two seagulls hovered in the distance. The thought of getting into the plane earlier that morning had caused me only a fleeting pang of apprehension, but nothing near the anxiety I had experienced each time I had opened the door to climb into the cockpit in the first few weeks of our flying adventure.

Maybe my brain was rewiring itself with more logic and less loony thinking. Maybe I was becoming more like a bird inside that winged machine. Kitty Hawk would be the penultimate stop in a chain of destination-based landings and takeoffs nearing 15 in number.

As we climbed the hill's path toward the quiet memorial honoring Orville and Wilbur Wright, it became clear that the towering granite structure was a vertical fin. At the base, the stone-carved script pays homage to the genius and perseverance of two men and others who, throughout history, dreamed of manned flight.

According to a Popular Mechanics article by John McMahon in September 1925: "The young bicycle men of Dayton, Ohio, had been discussing the problem of flight for about three years when the first real idea came to them in June 1899. They had spent Sundays lying on their backs beside the Miami River, hoping to learn something from the stately maneuvers of hawks and buzzards in the blue overhead. Then came that first real idea, which was Orville's -- to obtain lateral balance by hinged wings."

That unhinged fear I once clung to is giving way to a better understanding of how flight works, and a greater appreciation for its birth. A week after we were home, I woke one morning, and looking out my window, my first thought was, "What a day to go for a fly."

Wow. Fear -- and ignorance, its favorite cohort -- are becoming an ever tinier pebble in my path, not the humongous roadblock they once were, making made my heart race, my stomach turn and my palms perspire. If the Wright brothers could watch birds in flight and look at the way a long box warped when it was twisted, and bravely see those scientific principles as a pathway to flight, I could at least see a way to traveling without the heavy burden of my fear.

And so, as first happened for me on a hallowed ground of firsts, I began to realize as we walked through the National Park, disappointed that we'd have to wait a year and a half to visit the renovated museum at Kitty Hawk, that another door had already opened, showing fear the way out.

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